Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Very Superstitious

An interesting article in the British TimesOnline suggests that humans evolved to be superstitious, because of the way we reason intuitively about mechanisms that are hidden from us. This fits in nicely with Boyer's Religion Explainedwhich I have mentioned before, where it is argued that the human tendency to see agency behind natural phenomena explains the prevalence of gods in human culture.

It may be that, despite years of training in science, my mind is just such that I cannot, ultimately, throw off this intuition of an intelligent agent being behind things, as abstract and scientific as I have tried to make it (or It).

Or, perhaps we evolved to perceive the presence of the Almighty. My early fascination with Teilhard de Chardin may explain why I find this so compelling. Perhaps even more so are his delightful heresies concerning the Omega Point and Christogenesis, but this I will leave for another day.